About Asako Narahashi

Japanese photographer Asako Narahashi is best known for her images of large-scale color landscapes, taken while the artist herself is half-submerged in water. The rising and falling water occupies the majority of the frame—often wetting or misting the lens—leaving the viewer with an obscured view of buildings, bridges, people, and icons of Japan such as Mt. Fuji. In these framed confrontations between land and sea, water takes on an abstract quality as it threatens to overwhelm the figurative elements of her photographs—land and sea becoming a formal tension played out on the surface of the image. Simultaneously, Narahashi herself is faced with the danger of submersion during her process, which she sees as a broader meditation on the fragility of man-made structures and technologies when faced with the vicissitudes of the natural world.